- John Carmack signal boosting[1] Sarah Downey's article "This PC witch-hunt is killing free speech, and we have to fight it"[2]
- The critical comments on the obligatory "BLM" post in r/askscience[3]
- Glenn Loury's response[4] to Brown University's letter to faculty/alumni about racial justice.
- The failure[5] of a group of folks to cancel Steven Pinker over accusations of racial insensitivity.
[1] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1279105937404579841
[2] https://medium.com/@sarahadowney/this-politically-correct-wi...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gvc7k9/black_li...
[4] https://www.city-journal.org/brown-university-letter-racism
[5] https://mobile.twitter.com/sapinker/status/12799365902367907...
The article he linked to was a little peculiar. As someone who's inclined to agree with the author about the First Amendment, the poorly thought out paragraph about racism - using a link to hate crime statistics to demonstrate the low numbers of "actual racists," but then making a remark like The statement “black lives matter” is easy to agree with if you’re a decent human being, which raises some questions about why we all have so many not-decent people (just indecent, not actual racists?) in our social media feeds - distracted from the overall message.
Or is it the New York Times’ claim that “nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery?” https://mobile.twitter.com/maragay/status/116140196616729805....
Or is it that we need to “disrupt the western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” as BLM’s website claims? https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
Or is it that “institutions of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism” are all equivalent evils that must be “abolished,” as BLM’s DC chapter proclaims? https://fee.org/articles/is-black-lives-matter-marxist-no-an...
Or is it—as the 1619 project claims and which is now being taught in schools—the supposed historical fact that capitalism is an outgrowth of plantation slavery? https://www.city-journal.org/1619-project-conspiracy-theory
Or is it applied Marxism?
> No doubt, the organization itself was quite radical from the very beginning. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors described herself and fellow co-founder Alicia Garza as “trained Marxists” in a recently resurfaced video from 2015.
Look at how much the debate has transformed within the last month. It started out with universal condemnation of a murder committed by the police in Minnesota. Now, we are talking about tearing town statues of Abraham Lincoln: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2020/06/26/uw-... (“Students in the UW-Madison's Black student union are calling on university officials to remove the statue of the nation's 16th president.”) My high school, named after Thomas Jefferson, is thinking of renaming itself. We are debating whether the Constitution as a “pro-slavery document.”
I am pro-BLM. To me, it’s a matter of my faith, as well as my personal experience living in places like Baltimore and Philadelphia and realizing that Black people just aren’t getting a fair shake. I think people of every stripe can do something to help finish the job of reconstruction. Libertarians can pitch in to help end police abuse of minorities. Conservatives can help push forward school choice, which the majority of Black people support. Middle of the road people can agree that we need to undo the pro-confederacy monument building that happened during the KKK era.
But I also believe that our country rests on mostly admirable principles and history, and that Marxism is a recipe for suffering while capitalism is uplifting billions of people before our very eyes. I can hardly blame people who are skeptical when they are forced to chant a slogan that was coined by self-avowed Marxists. You can’t blame people for being cautious in their support of a movement that has under the same roof a majority of well-meaning people who simply want to eliminate police brutality and inequality, and a vocal minority of people who view those problems as an indictment of our entire country and it’s institutions. The far left, in characteristic fashion, has taken something most people could agree on, and pushed it further and further until normal people are forced to push back to keep society from crumbling beneath their feet. And that’s a tragedy for everyone, especially people who care about the core concept of fixing policing in America.
Why is this problematic for you? They're not saying children don't need caregivers, or that families are bad. They're saying the American nuclear family has downsides compared to other models, notably the extended family model common in African and Asian cultures. What makes a nuclear family "nuclear" is that it's self-contained; it's practically by definition not intergenerational, the way many effective non-American families are. It's an especially resonant point given the amount of effort American culture put into making sure black nuclear families couldn't succeed.
I feel like criticism of the American nuclear family has been pretty much fair game for decades; it's not like BLM invented that concern.
Question: can you see how mixing this into BLM is a problem? I can take an unpaid day off to protest police brutality but this very quickly escalated into something completely different.
FTR, my stance on this:
- I'm not happy to support anything that wants to remove police. More training: yes. Tougher penalties for people abusing police power: yes. But removing one of most effective stabilizers in the society: no. For all its warts, the police is important.
- While I grew up in the same house as my grandparents until I was 6 or so and while my mothers parents and other relatives walked freely in and out of the house as long as they could walk I do not want to support a movement that had any opinion on how I or anyone organize our family life
- I'm kind of a socialist at heart but sadly could never vote that way as a every socialist party around here pulls in ugly dependencies, so for now and for the foreseeable future, the second best option: support anyone who wants to leave people alone.
- As this movement had started to try to tear down Churchill - not the bravest ot noblest man - but arguably one of those whose actions mattered most to reduce police brutality (Gestapo) and racism in Europe and no one is stopping them I've concluded that this movement is beyond repair. (Anyone should feel free to prove me wrong here by turning that movement around.)
Edit:
- some clarification
- also, based on the feedback so far: am I misunderstanding something (I had a misunderstanding a few days ago where someone meant nazi but used an euphemisms that I didn't catch in that context.)
You belong to a culture and a nation which already enforces strong opinions on how its members organize our family lives. Therefore, it's a fair question to ask how effective those opinions are, and whether different opinions might be more effective.
Can you explain?
(My understanding is that my nation cares less about how people organize their lives than it has done for at least 900 years.
People live together 3 generations, other live as single, others as unmarried couples, married couples and everything in between.)